


Shadows of His Mind

by CaffieneKitty



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Books, Community: watsons_woes, Grief/Mourning, Libraries, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-06-09 21:18:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19484236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaffieneKitty/pseuds/CaffieneKitty
Summary: The hardest part, aside from the loss of Holmes himself, was the books.





	Shadows of His Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [watsons_woes](https://watsons-woes.dreamwidth.org/) [2019 July Writing Prompt #4 - A Good Book](https://watsons-woes.dreamwidth.org/1912264.html). Found this near impossible as picking a favorite book is impossible. So I picked a quote from one of them instead.

>   
>  _“There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.”_  
>  (Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr)  
> 

After his solo return from Switzerland, Watson would go into the sitting room at Baker Street and sit, until the absence got to much to bear. The hardest part, aside from the loss of Holmes himself, was the books. Volumes of maps, medicine, chemistry, poisons, along with Burke's Peerage, books on the law and the keeping of bees. A veritable trove of knowledge, all arranged tidily on shelves but in apparent disarray. There was no conceivable order to them.

They weren't alphabetical by author, publisher, title, or subject. Nor by date of publication, not even by color of cover (though Watson was certain Holmes would have never shelved things strictly by aesthetic value).

It wasn't as though they had been put back randomly; Watson clearly recalled Holmes putting his books back where they had come from on the shelf, and the shades of red, brown, green and black spines keeping the same overall melange. Holmes had shelved them this way. And Holmes did nothing without purpose.

On a good day, Watson had tried to puzzle out the system. Why Holmes might have put this book on mining practices between that book of anatomy and this book of poisons. Why not near a book on geology, or a book by the same publisher?

He'd thought for a while, if he could puzzle out what reasoning there was to the order of Holmes' books, he might gain some deeper understanding post-mortem into the mind of his deceased friend.

It came to nothing though. He looked and noted positions and even read pages that had been marked out with a slip of paper, a broken violin string, a calling card too worn to read the name.

For a while it brought a sad wistfulness, a sense of the man now gone, but in time it felt more like an autopsy of sorts. Or a seance. Mired in fruitless effort, trying to understand the mind of the dead.

In the end, Watson had moved on and left Holmes' books as they were, like their owner: a mystery left unsolved.

(Years later though, when he once again thought of Holmes and books together, it would be under infinitely better circumstances.)

-.-.-  
(that's it)


End file.
